certain tone. Even now, an accomplished person and a mother herself, she craved it.
“I wonder,” he said quietly.
She waited. He paused, took a sip of that lemonade. She did the same—it was cool and tart, reminded her of days long gone—sitting with her mother playing cards at night. They never had a television. She watched nonstop at Tess’s and Hank’s, but at home it was books and art, cards and board games. They’d sit on the porch and listen to the owls, watch the stars, talk about this and that, or nothing. Sometimes they just sat. Did people still do that?
“I wonder if this is really the story you want to tell.”
She felt that flutter of annoyance, of disappointment that was so familiar in her father’s presence. She wanted him to say what her mother would have said: Write your way in. If the story is there, you’ll know it.
“What does that mean?”
He looked at her, waited. She stared at him until he dropped his gaze, took off his glasses and rubbed at his nose. He still wore his wedding band. Her mother never took hers off either.
“You told me to lock it up tight,” she said. The words tasted like gravel in her mouth, gritty, dirty. “I did that.”
“I did tell you that,” he said. “I’ve since revised my thinking on that matter. These days I have a lot of time to reflect.”
There was a stack of books on the table by the rocker. The Snow Leopard, The Prophet, a volume on northern birds, The Wisdom of the Sufi Sages, Zen and the Brain.
“A lot of the mistakes I made in my life were due to the things I didn’t want to examine about my past. There’s power in telling the story. You know that, don’t you?”
“The story’s been told.”
“Not by you.”
“I’m not the one to tell it.”
“There’s no one who can tell it better,” he said. “This story, the one you’ve brought to me. It’s that story. Surely you see. Because if these crimes are connected, that’s the beginning.”
Lily started to cry, her voice carrying over the distance between them, as thin and distant as birdsong. But Rain felt it in her body. She got up quickly, eager to get away from the conversation. But her father put a hand on her arm.
“I’ll get her,” he said, hopping up. He seemed so happy, she didn’t have the heart to stop him. She figured she’d hear Lily start to wail as some weird man she barely knew lifted her from her car seat. But when he came back, the baby was happily smiling in his arms. She’d go to anyone, obviously. Weren’t babies only supposed to want their mommies? He had the diaper bag over his other shoulder, looked like a natural with it.
“She knows her grandpa, doesn’t she?” he said.
“Ba! Ba!” Lily enthused.
“Baba! Yes! That’s a perfect name for me,” her father said, clearly pleased.
Rain’s heart was still knocking with annoyance, with an odd kind of fear. She followed her father inside, his words bouncing around the inside of her skull. She was forced to ask herself the worst question she could imagine asking: Was her father right?
To tell the story she was thinking about telling, did she have to dive into her own shadowy past, as well? Was the reason she couldn’t fully move on from that day in the woods that she’d never really told it? She hadn’t narrated her experience; she’d buried it. Now it was digging its way up and through her psyche. It was a child’s memory. Maybe she needed to face it as an adult.
“Where did that come from?”
Her father had placed Lily in a high chair she’d never seen before. It looked ancient but sturdy.
He looked at her with a smile. “It’s yours. It was in the basement.”
She put her hand on it. It was solid wood with bunnies carved into the seat, a tray that fit in neatly like Jenga blocks. No strap. She had no memory of it.
“See, it pays to be a hoarder,” said her father. He went into the diaper bag and retrieved the little plastic container of Cheerios, her sippy cup. “All this minimalist garbage about getting rid of all your things, clutter clearing. Clutter is life!”
“Why did you take it out?”
Lily bounced happily, shoved a few Cheerios in her mouth. She was fixated by her “Baba”—maybe it was the glasses. The kid couldn’t take her eyes off him.